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Books Environmental politics History

So do you reckon it will rain today?

September 24, 2008 – 8:32 pm

I've lived in three flats in London that have led me into regular, if short, contact with large numbers of neighbours whom I've barely got to know. Consequently, I've got very good at talk about the weather (although I remain extremely bad at predicting it.) The British talk about the weather, a lot, perhaps because theirs is so changeable, but also because they are such a polite race – politics, religion, etc are all distinctly "out".

And it seems from Jan Golinski's work that it was ever thus. In British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment, he finds, however, that from the Enlightenment onwards, about the end of the 17th century, there was a significant change in the way in which people talked about the weather — or at least how educated people talked about it. Extreme events came to be regarded less as acts of god and more as natural phenomena to be explained (although as Golinski notes in the conclusion, even today, as in some discussion about Hurricane Katrina, some haven't managed to reach the stage of basic enlightenment).

As you might expect, the change was founded on science, or at least attempted science, which can be traced back to the efforts of the Royal Society in the 1660s. Robert Hooke published his "Method for Making a History of the Weather" in 1667, laying out the format that a daily journal should take. A few recorders, who more or less followed these methods – meticulously in the case of William Derham – were published in the Society's Philosophical Transactions. In the 1780s British efforts, which had been sporadic, were sharpened by efficient "competition" from France and Germany.

The efforts took a more popular form in The Gentleman's Magazine, which from 1751 began monthly accounts from the London physician John Fothergill, while later Thomas Barker in Rutland and the famous naturalist Gilbert White (whose The Natural History of Selbourne has just been republished) also contributed.

The notion of climate had, Golinski records, once meant simply a zone of latitude and later extended to mean the conditions of a place, including its atmosphere. Classical writers, including Caesar and Tacitus, had begun a familiar refrain about the British damp, but during the Enlightenment period, the trope gradually shifted: the weather was part of what made Britain great.- moderate and only gently variable in temperature and precipitation – indeed "civilised".

Studying the weather in the 18th century meant doing so politely – having a cultural marker that set you off from the common mass – John Pointer dismissed claims that storms represented armies fighting in the air as "barbarous" or "vulgar". Another commentator complained that "in the last Century it as …a prevailing Opinion among the Vulgar that the Winds were in some measure, under the direction of the internal spirits". Appropriate records and scientific investigation and explanation could, these men (and they were nearly all men – Margaret Mackenzie of Delvine, Perthshire, who kept a meticulous temperature record at her home from 1780 to 1802 being a rare exception about whom Golinski unfortunately tells us no more) banish such misunderstandings.

Although, of course, the science was far from up to the job. The great summer haze of 1783 cause, we now know, by a dust and gas plume from a volcanic fissure in Iceland, was beyond 18th-century science's powers of explanation, although Benjamin Franklin did get it right, but it seems no one believed him. One newspaper called it a "universal Perturbation in Nature".

While this is clearly a solidly grounded academic work, Golinski provides plenty of colour to leaven his account, which is interesting enough in its own terms (and he's blessed short on academic jargon). So he tells us about Thomas Barker (1722-1809), squire of Lyndon Hall in the county of Rutland, who took his dedication to weather recording, as to other scientific experiments. "Twice a day, month after month, year after year, Barker read his thermometer and barometer, at times that he measure to the minute…" There were however occasional interruptions, as on his marriage in 1751 to the sister of Gilbert White. His recording here was less meticulous, however: he wrote in his diary "at Selbourne, etc". (What Anne White thought or perhaps wrote about the marriage unfortunately doesn't seem to have survived.)
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Books Environmental politics History

What Homo erectus and Cro-Magnons can teach us

September 21, 2008 – 6:33 am

Reading Chris Stringer’s Homo britannicus is a bit like going down to the pub beer garden on a sunny Sunday afternoon and listening to an acquaintance who’s fast becoming a friend setting out their life’s work and passion – he wants you to grasp the excitement of the work, and understand what’s going on, but he’s also scrupulous in making clear in this fast-moving field what’s now known fact, what’s generally believed but could be overturned in a moment, and the theories he holds that run against the general view of the field.

What’s more, he wants you to understand why this is important, beyond the pure science, beyond the romance of history – for his study of the spread of 700,000 years of human occupation of Britain has a powerful lesson about just how difficult an environment this proved for multiple species Homo, and just how often the environment wiped them out, or forced them to flee. (No current Britain no claim to really be a “native” – at most their ancestors have spent 11,500 years on these isles; between 500,000 and 12,000 years ago there was only human occupation for about 20% of the time, with none at all between 180,000 and 70,000 years ago.)

Stringer is one of the leading lights in the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project, which after centuries of amateur enthusiasm and chance discoveries has sought to bring planning and careful science to a field that’s often been left to chance, amateur enthusiasm, and occasionally blighted, as with the Piltdown Man, by forgery, and more frequently by over-claim and media distortion.

He begins with a brisk skip through this often less than illustrious history – starting with the pioneering Michele Mercati, director of the Vatican Botanic Gardens who in 1590 first recognised flint tools for what they are, rather than “thunderbolts” or “elfshots”, as they were known. He was ignored, a later pioneer, Isaac de la Peytere, concluded these were the works of “pre-Adamite man”, and had his books publicly burnt in Paris for his trouble. Gradually, however, light emerged through the religious fog, with by about 1820 the idea that there had been successive creations, each destroyed by a flood, gaining ground. This is no dry list, for Stringer keeps his tale entertaining, painting a picture of the eccentric but for his time remarkably scientific Reverend William Buckland, who proceeded on his investigatory travels by horse, always dressed in academic gown and top hat. Beginning the modern science of taphonomy, he imported hyena from Africa to study its feeding habits, with the intention of then dissecting it, but he became so fond of “Billy” he kept the animal for 25 years as a pet, which had the disconcerting habit, for dinner guests, of chomping whole guinea pugs under the sofa.

But the story properly begins 700,000 years ago – at a site in what is now East Anglia, where a species using only shaped stones for tools lived on a peninsula linked to western Europe. The site is Pakefield, and, Stringer explains, through a technique called amino-acid dating, human occupation here has been dated back this far – the oldest firmly dated site north of the Alps. The tools are very simple – but, he explains, they were made from water-worn pebbles, a material not suited to large flaked tools like handaxes. The flora and fauna of the time suggests a remarkably mild environment, and it is clear that Stringer inclines towards supporting the view that this “Costa del Cromer” was only a brief episode of migration under unusually favourable conditions, not real adaptation to anything like normal northern conditions.

There’s then a gap to 500,000 years ago, when Homo heidelbergensis, a species that made very finely shaped handaxes, lived (and thought to be an ancestor of both Neanderthals and us) – best known through the much-reported Boxgrove site. It deserves its fame, for rare conditions of preservation mean that not only mere artefacts are preserved, but moments in real time – when a person crouched down to knap a flint tool, then walked off with it, leaving the debris spread around the worksite and their footprints visible. There are also butchery sites – the bones and the tools left there when the work was done.

But the evidence also shows more – for on the bones of the big game being butchered here, rhinos, deer and horses, the human tool marks on the bones always precede the teeth marks of hyena or wolves – indicating that these people were either capable of hunting game for themselves, or at least at fighting off the fiercest of scavengers until they’d got what they wanted from a carcass. Stringer explains that when this discovery was made in the 1990s it was a revelation – for while secondary scavenging and using tools for marrow extraction may have been enough to allow the first human expansion out of Africa about 2 million years ago, primary access, with intestines and offal, meant a much better quality and variety of food.

Very late in the work at Boxgrove, on one last throw of the dice, the investigators found one of the Boxgrove men – or at least his tibia and a couple of teeth. From this they were able to draw conclusions about the sort of individual this diet could produce – 1.8 metres ( 5 foot 11) tall, weighing about 90kg (200lb), and perhaps 40 years old when he died. What’s more, they know he was righthanded – from the marks on his teeth made when he used then as a “third hand” while slicing items with stone tools. (Reading this book, one often longs for a time machine – but with this level of science you almost have one.)
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Books History Women's history

A woman of Byzantium

September 15, 2008 – 7:56 am

It is normal for an author to flatter their readers, to treat them as people of high knowledge and intelligence – why else would they have chosen the book? So it is a bit of a surprise when Judith Herrin begins Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire by explaining that she was inspired to write it when two passing workmen knocked on her door and asked “what is Byzantine history”. All they knew, she explains, is that it “something to do with Turkey”.

Not exactly flattering to the reader, but be reassured, while at one level this might be a literary version of a popular British television show What the Romans/Victorians/etc did for us, there’s a lot more depth than that, and you’ll finish these 300-odd pages feeling educated, informed, and entertained.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Byzantium, because it has such a wonderful range of powerful interesting women, as I found some 15 years ago when I last studied the subject of its history, although the course I took then resembles some of the texts Herrin describes without approval, as being little more than a long list of emperors and battles. Her Byzantium, while broadly chronological, isn’t arranged like that, but rather list of themes and stories, which overall present a very satisfying overview.

If you’re thinking of Byzantium, then you can only think of the Hagia Sophia, and Herrin provides a reminder that it was not some late flowering of the ancient world, but the energetic burst of something new, and behind it once again was a strong woman – not (just) Justinian’s famous and much maligned empress Theodora, but a wealthy senatorial lady, Juliana Anicia, who had just built a grand church, St Polyeuktos’s, on her own property. But it was Theodora to whom more credit was due, for it was just before the great church was begun that she, ancient accounts seem to agree, stiffened Justinian’s backbone when he was about to flee before a mob riot that conveniently cleared a large tranche of the centre of Constantinople.

It supports, with its very great weight and power, Herrin’s thesis, that Byzantium boasted “a rich ecology of traditions and resources” – it didn’t just passively preserve ancient traditions, as Gibbon claimed, just waiting for the West to be ready to receive them again, but rather creatively and constructively engaged with and developed them:

It bequeathed to the world an imperial system of government built upon a trained, civilian, administration and tax system; a legal structure based on Roman law; a unique curriculum of secular education that preserved much of pagan, classical learning; orthodox theology, artistic expression and spiritual traditions enshrined in the Green church; and coronation and court rituals that had many imitators.”

And when the doomed Constantine XI in 1453 made his final desperate call to the last remnant of the empire, its capital, to resist the Ottoman Turks, he called out in Greek to his people to prove themselves true Romans – to emphasising the continuity of 1,323 years of Constantinople’s history, and much further back. But long before that, Herrin argues, Byzantium’s ability to withstand, albeit eventually in much reduced form, the shock of the Arab onslaught as the tribes burst out of Arabia, in the eighth century that protected a then ill-prepared West, which would otherwise have been overwhelmed.

But this is a book that bears its theses lightly – mostly it is just a fine collection of yarns about a great and complex civilisation over more than a millennium. And you meet a great many interesting women along the way, among them:

  • Olympias, a wealthy heiress who supported a nunnery in Constantinople late in the 4th century, which remained in existence for more than two centuries, possibly longer, and in the early 7th century the abbess Sergia wrote an account of the miraculous recovery of its relics.
  • Amalasuntha, daughter of the OstroGoth and late western Roman ruler Theoderic, who on his death in 526 became regent for her 10-year-old son, Athalaric.
  • Olga, widow of the Rus (Russian) leader Igor, who in the mid 10th century made a visit to Constantinople with an entourage of merchants, interpreters and a Christian priest. She left converted, having taken the historic name of Helena, from the wife of Constantine VII’s. This is seen as the start of the conversion of the Rus. (The Byzantines, unlike Islam, and until the Reformation, encouraged the use of the vernacular in worship.)
  • Maria Argyropoulaina, who introduced in the fork to the west, despite initial claims that they were pretentious. She had been married to Giovanni, son of Pietro II (doge 991-1008) after Venice helped Byzantium thwart an Arab siege at Bari. Sadly, although after they were married in Constantinople in 1004, returned to Venice to much acclamation and had a son, all three then perished in an epidemic.
  • Kale Pakourianos, widow of a Georgian military commander for Byzantium, who supported the Georgian monastery of Viron on Mount Athos.
  • And of course there’s the celebrated historian Anna Komnene, who has a whole chapter to herself, as a writer of a work that Herrin considers “bold, novel and surprising”. Herrin adds: “No other medieval woman, East or West, had the vision, confidence and the capacity to realize an equally ambitious project”.

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Books History

Rowland Strong’s Nice of times terrible

September 11, 2008 – 6:38 pm

One of my great pleasures on holiday is reading books of no conceivable use whatsoever, just interest, and as a source the London Library is perfect for the purpose. So thus it is that I come to be sitting on my hotel balcony in Beaulieu-sur-Mer (just down the road from Nice), having just finished the original copy from the library’s copy of Rowland Strong’s The Diary of an English Resident in France During Twenty-two Weeks of War Time (which you can also read online). That’s the First World War, and the first weeks of it. Probably keenly in demand in the library of 1916 when it was purchased – although only borrowed eight times in the past decade.

Strong it seems was a jobbing correspondent (there’s a piece of his from the New York Times online), and I’d say this source is being kind when it suggests he “seems to have been a fervent anti-Semite”, given some of the passages in The Diary. Of course it isn’t fair to judge a man of 1916 by the standards of today, but it seems to me that even by his day’s standards he must have been a pretty virulent racist, as well as of course being highly classist and misogynist. (He writes after the bombing of Reims cathedral: “The only other people fiendish and barbarous enough to have conceived and set the example of such an abominable act of vandalism, within recent times, are the British suffragettes.” p. 170 – a lovely example of the kind of hostility they must have engendered in this sort of “gentleman”.)

He also suffers from a “spies under the bed mania” and I had to laugh at the bit where he’s advised that he should take a story to the Daily Mail when no one else will print it – nothing changed there then.

You can, perhaps forgive him an anti-German prejudice, as in this passage (and as someone who’s tried to read Kant in translation I have some sympathy on this score), but he’s just as bad about other races:

“Both of these French naval officers were admirers of, and had an intimate acquaintance with English art and books, to a far greater extent than I have ever found among Germans with all their boasted ‘kultur’. And with all of it a lightnes of touch, a lambent humour, a sprightly wit, which, as compared with the long-winded, wranglesome conversation of the intellectual German, is as light to darkness.” (p. 22)

But there’s still a pathos in reading this account – written just down the road from where I am now, in one of the buildings probably still standing there, a pathos that comes from the fact that Strong doesn’t know what happens next – or indeed often what is happening at the time. In a casual aside he notes that men coming back from the front note the guns are very loud – you can imagine some poor mentally battered soldier telling this tale, and the bluff Englishman playing it down. Which is not to say that he’s totally unrealistic; he writes on August 10 (1914) from Nice: “There is an idea gaining ground here that Germany is already suing for peace, on account of food difficulties. I fear this is still a little premature.” (p. 41)
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Books Feminism Women's history

The other story of Abelard and Heloise

August 25, 2008 – 11:35 am

The story of Abelard and Heloise is normally told as a great love story, a sort of medieval Romeo and Juliet. But there was much more to the story – Abelard was a rebel, and perhaps surprisingly a proponent of women’s ordination, at least in some forms.

This story is told in Gary Macy’s The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West. As that title suggests, Macy finds plenty of evidence that at least until the early 12th-century, the ordination of women was generally not particularly remarkable in the church, although ordination was — for both men and women — a less defined rite, something that formally placed an individual in a position, rather than an institutional rule and ladder.

It was Abelard’s much-hated teacher Anselm, the most celebrated scholar at the School of Laon, who was running a line that would completely remove women from ordained ministry, restricting true ordination to priests and deacons, and arguing that there were no true women deaconesses in the scripture, and only heretics had allowed them.

Macy says that Abelard was consistently and vehemently opposed to that position, writing for example in response to Heloise’s request for a history of the ordo of holy women, which, Macy suggests may have been “a cry for defense of women’s orders in the high Middle Ages”. In this work, Aberlard “argues that this ordo was established by Jesus himself and not by the apostles, specifically rejecting the teaching that only the male priesthood and diaconate were part of the original church. Further, this ordo predates even the Lord in the great Jewish women of Hebrew scripture, and in Anna and in Elizabeth, whom Abelard dramatically described as prophets to the prophets.”

Macy adds that both Heloise and Abelard asserted that the title abbess was the new name for the ancient order of deaconesses.

And, Macy adds, Abelard was far from alone in this in his time, but by the end of the 12th century, the memory of women’s ordination was being written out of church history. One of the early proponents of the “it never happened” school was Rufinus, writing between 1157 and 1159, who defined “real ordination” as ordination to the altar and everything else as mere commissioning to a job. Consequently, Macy concludes: “In one of the most successful propaganda efforts ever launched, a majority of Christians came to accept that ordination had always been limited to the priestgood and the diaconate and that women had never served in either ministry.”

In reaching this point, Macy has been able to recover just a few women from this great coverup, and a little about their circumstances. Hildeburga, the wife of Segenfrid, bishop of Le Mans from 963-996 is remembered because a later writer treated her husband disparagingly because he married and bequeathed a large portion of church property to his son. (But since churches were hereditary in the period, this was probably no big deal at the time.)

Namatius, the wife of a 5th-century bishop of Clermont-Ferrand, is recorded by Gregory of Tours, generally no friends of clergy wives, as pious and humble, and the donor of the church of St Stephen.

“She wanted it to be decorated with coloured frescoes. She used to hold in her lap a book from which she would read stories of events which happened long ago, and tell the workmen what she wanted painted on the walls.”

Then there’s the very curious Brigid of Ireland, who is ordained as a bishop in her own right, if by accident, since the ordaining bishop was “intoxicated with the grace of God”. And apparently to prove this right, while she was being ordained a pillar of fire ascended from her head.

Also surviving is the early medieval Mozarbic rite for ordaining abbesses (which was distinguished from the rite for abbots), Macy reports. “When an abbess is ordained, she is vested in the sacristy by one dedicated to God, and the religious mitre is placed on her head… At the conclusion of the rite, both received from the bishop a staff and a copy of the rule of the order, as well as the kiss of peace from the bishop”.

And the abbess had the duty to hear her nun’s confessions, with at least two of the rules stressing the importance of doing this daily. “For all intents and purposes, abbesses plated the same role for their communities in hearing confession and in absolving sin as did bishops or priests for their communities.” And it is clear that in some convents, communion services were not led by a priest, but most likely by the abbess.

This is all, in the modern context of controversy about the place of women in various churches — the subject of bishops currently consuming much energy in the Anglican communion — all explosive stuff, and the more powerful for the fact that Macy carefully positions himself outside the modern arguments, taking a place as merely a medieval scholar who stumbled across these facts and wanted to correct the historical record. Accompanying this is writing that seems almost deliberately dull – you can see the author tiptoeing over the modern political quicksands, sticking firmly to the “I’m only doing historical scholarship” path.

So there’s not gripping reading here, but important stuff. And there might even be a lesson in here for the modern church, which is, one analyst says women “feel forced out of the church because of its “silence” about sexual desire and activity, and because of its hostility to single-parent families and unmarried couples”.

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Books Environmental politics

The collapse of the Roman empire, and the teetering of our own

August 24, 2008 – 1:43 pm

You might think that the world doesn’t need another why-the-Roman-empire-collapsed theory, when there are already so many to choose from – according to one professor’s count 210. Depending on your disposition you might like to cling to vintage Gibbon – moral decline, or prefer the technological theory of Richter – that the Germans invented the horseshoe, or the plague theory of McNeill. There’s no shortage.

But the reason for such diversity of explanations is surely that the collapse of the Roman empire, at least in the Western world where theories of continual progress tend to rule (rather than the predominant eastern model of rise-collapse-rise, which regards such change as normal) is the exemplar of collapse – the very model of fear. If we can decode this, explain it, then maybe we can avoid going the same way ourselves.

So it makes perfect sense that Thomas Homer-Dixon in his The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilisation has a new theory- or at least an elaboration on some of the old economic ones that relates explicitly to our current world civilisation. And he’s also pretty good at explaining why this is indeed a good model for us. A society’s complexity can be measured by its level of urbanisation, he says, and at the height of the empire, the population of Rome probably topped 1 million, and may have reached 1.5 million. The empire’s total population was probably around 60 million, between 15 and 20 per cent urbanised: perhaps 30 per cent in Europe, 20 per cent on the Italian peninsula. No European city approached 1 million again until London reached it in the 19th century. (And yet the level of complexity the Romans reached is many orders of magnitude lower than that at which we are today – where it is expected that by 2030 4 BILLION people will live in cities.)

You can’t fault Homer-Dixon on the empirical, slightly mad but informative research that underlies The Upside – a calculation of the energy required to build the Colosseum. Energy here of course is the form of grain hay and oil – the fuel that powered the human and animal muscles doing the work. So it is, after all of the work, he and a research assistant conclude that: “the Romans had to dedicate, every year for five years, at least 19.8 square kilometers to grow wheat and 35.3 square kilometers – or almost the area of the island of Manhatten. And to capture the solar energy needed to extract, move, carve and hoist the single keystone … they needed nearly 1,300 suqare metres of farmland.” And that, he explains, is an under-estimate, for it doesn’t count the land needed to feed the farm workers growing the stuff.

But while the Colosseum might have been the grand daddy of arenas, it was almost matched by similar grand structures all around the empire. (The one in Nimes, for example, has stood since about 100AD in in one way or another.) And this wasn’t frippery – it was the way the empire showed its power and weight. It wasn’t possible to just build enough and stop, Homer-Dixon explains. (A parallel form of consumerism you might say.)

But, Thomas-Dixon says, the Romans had an impossible problem: “The Roman empire was locked into a food-based energy system. As the empire expanded and matured; as it exploited, and in some cases exhausted, the Mediterranean region’s best cropland and then moved on to cultivate poorer lands; and as its grain supply lines snaked farther and farther from its major cities, it had to work harder and harder to produce each additional ton of grain.” Giving this a technical label, he describes this as the “energy return on investment”. (And the comparison with our oil-based economies, and the increasingly difficulty of extraction, is pretty obvious.)

The bulk of the book explores the obvious problem here – increasing complexity requires more and more energy to maintain yet, yet energy is getting harder and harder to find – and finding it takes more and more energy in the mere process. Thomas-Dixon looks back to Rome to see how they handled the problem – which he sees as becoming all too evident first around 180AD: “Rome’s control of its frontier territories disintegrated and many were abandoned. Travel and trade became unsafe, and literacy and recordkeeping plummeted; commerce declined. Although tax revenues were static or declining, government costs continued to go up as emperors tried to secure their power by expanding the dole, increasing the size of the army, boosting soldiers’ pay and holding more games and spectacles.”

Thomas-Dixon credits Aurelian and Diocletian for arresting the slide by introducing “complex and harsh measures to extract more energy from the land”. A rudimentary budget was introduced, with the tax being set each year in grain and other produce according to the calculated needs of the state, while theland was closely surveyed and every potentially productive bit identified – and tied to a particular person whose activities were also closely tracked – and many essential occupations were made compulsory and hereditary. But this meant, eventually, more rising taxes, and farmers either starving or fleeing. “By the 5th century in the West, the empire was literally burning through its capital – its productive farmland and its peasantry. Peasants deserted their lands, so power and wealth were increasingly concentrated in the hands of large landowners, who then used their influence to evade taxes. …. As state finances deteriorated, public services like roads, bridges, aqueducts and the postal service broke down.” (Put your own modern parallel of choice in here….)

You might have noticed by now that this is all pretty gloomy stuff, while the title of the book is apparently upbeat. For Thomas-Dixon devotes the last third of the book for trying to imagine how we can minimise the damage, and grow something positive from the wreckage. This is his prescription:

“First, we must reduce as much as we can the force of the underlying tectonic stresses in order to lower the risk of synchronous failure – that is, of catastrophic collapse that cascades across boundaries between technological, social and ecological systems. Second, we need to cultivate a prospective mind so we can cope better with surprise. Third, we must boost the overall resilience of critical systems like our energy and food supply networks. And fourth, we need to prepare to turn breakdown to our advantage when it happens.”

Thomas-Dixon visits the Temple of Jupiter in Baalbek , and particularly the trilithon – an enormous, hugely energy-intensive, and to us wholly pointless structure. He walks down the modern, damaged street, past a shiny new cash machine, and “reflected on alternative value systems that could help us achieve different futures… our values must be compatible with the exigencies of the natural world we live in and depend on. They must implicitly recognize the laws of thermodynamics, energy’s role in our survival, the dangers of certain kinds of connectivity, and the nonlinear behaviour of natural systems like climate. The endless material growth of our economies in fundamentally inconsistent with these physical facts of life.”

When we discussed Thomas-Dixon’s work at my book club, you could easily divide the group in two, into the optimists and the pessimists. The former focused on Thomas-Dixon’s exploration of Holling’s panarchy theory. Based on observations of cycles in forests, which go through a cycle of growth, collapse, regeneration, and a return to growth. In short – the total biomass of the forest grows as it develops, the genetic diversity grows, it evolves to maintain a stable system, through connected mechanisms that keep temperature, rainfall and chemical concentrations within the ranges best for the life of the forest. The result is maximum efficiency, maximum biomass from the inputs of sunlight, water and nutrients. But this fine-tuning eventually means that the system is less resiliant, and can’t cope with an inevitable shock, a change in climate, a fire, or the arrival of a new invasive species. But, panarchy says, this means for the overall system – the world – the potential is introduced for creative change – new species, new ecological cycles, more overall diversity. So, from the ashes, comes something even better.

But the pessimists, however, among whom I’d have to count myself, focused on the destruction, and couldn’t see this conclusion in panarchy as much more than wishful thinking. As we’ve seen in too many real forests – from the Amazon to the Pacific – what’s more likely to replace the forest after the shock is a much less productive, low-level ecosystem of grassland or scrub. Something, in Thomas-Dixon’s terms, producing and storing far less, and far lower quality, energy.

Nevertheless, although Thomas-Dixon didn’t leave me in an upbeat mood, he offers an analysis that is not only interesting but also potentially productive. Combing the concerns of energy and complexity does allow an important focus on the need to talk about, to advance, to promote resilience. Today talk in the public and private sectors focuses on “efficiency”, on using the minimum resources and money to deliver a service. My favourite example of the dangers of this is the Auckland power crisis of 1998. It is clear from Thomas-Dixon’s account that in our increasingly complex world, we have to stop talking about building “efficient” systems as the great goal and start aiming for resilient ones.

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